Original title: Meng long zheng dong

“Brucesploitation” is a name given to dozens of films starring the likes of Brice Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Lie, Bruce Ly and countless others that popped up in the wake of the death of martial arts superstar Bruce Lee. Apart from the fact that they were of Chinese ancestry and could throw a few kung fu shapes, none of these interlopers looked much like Lee and ceratibly had none of his charisma, athleticism or martial arts prowess. But the films threw up a number of fantasy flavoured titles along the way, among them She nu yu chao/Bruce Lee in New Guinea (1978), Shen wei san meng long/The Clones of Bruce Lee (1980), the South Korean Amelika bangmungaeg/ Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave/Visitor of America (1976) and the thoroughly demented Li san jiao wei zhen di yu men/The Dragon Lives Again (1976). Chia-Chun Wu’s Bruce Lee Against Supermen (also known as Superdragon vs Superman) isn’t as crazy as the latter (few things are), but it certainly has its fair share of head-scracthingly weird moments.

Take the beginning for instance. Brucesploitation regular Bruce Li turns up as none other than Kato, the chauffeur/assistant to the Green Hornet played by Lee in the 1966-1967 television series. Copyright is flouted right from the off, though certainly with the English dub, there’ seems to have been a case of cold feet as the character is, after the opening scenes, referred to as “Carter” instead, though as we’ll eventually see, he’s still an associate of The Green Hornet – at least after a fashion… Carter is sent to rescue Dr Ting (Yeung Yee-Muk), inventor of a formula that could end world hunger by extracting albumen from petroleum (it’s best not to think about these things too closely) who has been kidnapped along with his adult daughter Alice. Carter’s investigations lead him to master criminal Tiger (Chu Bo-Lin), meeting along the way a pair of acrobatic monkey-masked kung fu fighters in the employ of Superman (Lung Fei), a largely undistinguished mustachioed man in a tiny white cape whose main superpowers seem to be the ability to jump high and command a fee of a “hundred thousand cash, ten nice girls and a truck full of booze.” He’s not the Superman, just a bog-standard villain in a silly costume. t the climax, “The Green Hornet” (Keung-Mou Si-Yu) turns up, having been off-screen for most of the film, but he’s not dressed in his usual garb – that would have been a copyright violation too far – but in a bright-red costume that looks suspiciously like those worn by Italian comedy superheroes The 3 Supermen.

The Green Hornet had been a hit in Hong Kong where it was promoted as The Kato Show, making their local boy the star of the show, which explains, but scarcely excuses, the film’s sheer copyright flouting cheek (The Green Hornet‘s title cards are pressed into service here as the backgrounds for the film’s title sequence). You may marvel at how they got away with all this, but there’s precious little else here to impress. It lacks the sheer madness of The Dragon Lives Again (surely the wildest of all the Bruce Lee lookalike films) and although it’s a lot weirder than the run-of-the-mill Bruceploitation film, it’s not much to right home about. Li is as energetic as ever so the fight scenes are OK but they’re too lethargically shot and edited to really make much of an impact and the rest of the action scenes never cut the mustard – there’s the world’s most polite car chase (no-one seems to break the speed limit for a second), an equally dull foot chase and an inexplicable bit of business involving Carter pursuing some villains while lugging a rickshaw after him.

All of this is incongruously set to an organ and wah wah guitar-heavy prog-rock score from Yung-Yu Chen which is as incongruous as anything else in the film and may well have been lifted from another film entirely. Certainly the car chase scene is scored to an uncredited passage from Karn Evil 9 from Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery album (which goes some way to explaining that ever-present Hammond organ in those scenes) and some prints have had cues from Henry Mancini’s score for The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) clumsily spliced in. The magpie borrowings at least ensure that you stay awake during it all, keen to see what they’re going to be borrowing from next, but that’s hardly a reason to waste 84 precious minutes of your life on it, not when there are far more entertaining Brucesploitation films to be found, many of them also starring Li.

Born Ho Chung-tao in Taiwan, Li  made a career initially as a stunt man (he claimed that Golden Harvest offered him the chance to stand in for a recently deceased Lee in order to finish his final film, Game of Death (eventually not released until 1978) but that he declined the offer) before becoming an actor in his own right. He started his Brucesploitation career in Xin si wang you xi/Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death (1975) and went on to be one of the most prolific of Lee imitators. He later expressed regret at his career having being sidetracked into this kind of often tasteless exploitation and eventually retired from the game at the age of 40, leaving 32 films in his wake. Bruce Lee Against Supermen was his second Bruceploitation film and although the films he appeared in would rarely be much better, few were quite as dull as this.